"This post is about the desktop operating systems that fly under the radar of most people. We are definitely not talking about Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, or even BSD or Solaris. There are much less mainstream options out there for the OS-curious." Though the article doesn't go into much detail about the OSes, it is a good round up of some of the interesting candidates.

I've tried ReactOS, Syllable, Sky, and a few others. I haven't been able to get them to run on the bare hardware. I just have very generic devices, nothing exotic they shouldn't handle. One of the awesome things about Beos 5 was it just worked on my computer. It even supported my tv card, and just ran my system better than windows or linux.